VIEWS Module Nightmare

OK, so this site is my baby.

I've been playing with Drupal for a couple of years now. I built a nice enterprise-level site for the Virginia Beach Democrats and have built several test-beds where I've tried to hone my skills.

This site was going to be my first live "everything-site"...and I was looking forward to doing a lot of multimedia and Views customization.

Here is what I found out about Creating Menus with the Views Module.

DO NOT ENTER THE URL ALIAS AS THE SHORTCUT OF YOUR MENU LINK!!
LET YOUR URL ALIAS MODULE HANDLE THIS TASK! Use the "taxonomy/term/##" form as the URL for your menu links.

Basically I wanted my taxonomy terms to be sorted and have custom headers at the top of the View page. Like how Dries Buytaert's site does when clicking on different Taxonomy links...but I was trying to go one better...

...I wanted to be able to SKIP the label all together and use the "Header" Option for some views and not for others, like so:

I'd get it to work from my menu items, but then as soon as I'd click on the actual taxonomy link in the bottom of the post...POOF...away my custom VIEW would go...along with my nice header and footers.

What's more...

...I'd create a View starting by opening the link from my taxonomy module...set the view to filter by the Content Type and then the corresponding Taxonomy for that type (I even tried by just filtering by only the Taxonomy type) and again...the page rendered between the Menu item and by actually clicking on the Taxonomy link at the bottom of the post were totally different.

I was not seeing this at the top of views that I'd already created:

What I saw instead were the tabs that are used to create a view...like it wasn't even there. Even though I know it WAS because the CONTENT was correctly displayed.

I spent hours trolling through Drupal.org and found the Views Module documentation to be quite helpful with a range of very advanced stuff...just not this one. And yet it seemed so simple.

The wierdest part was that my Custom View would work from the shortcut with the aliased URL in it...up until I clicked on it's corresponding Taxonomy item from my post....then it would break.

What's worse, is that when I tried to Edit the view and change the URL from the menu it created to "taxonomy/term/36" the menu item would not create itself back up under the automatic Hierarchy of my categories for my menu...it'd toss the item to some random spot...and then would not let me EDIT it.

The Fix?

1. First, I deleted all of the custom views I'd thus far created based on a taxonomy term.

2. Then, I created a custom URL Alias for each of my taxonomy terms.

• I did this by going to admin>Categories and clicking "list terms" for the given vocabulary.
• Then I right clicked each taxonomy to open in a new tab.
• Opened my URL Alias admin page at admin/build/path in a new window.
• Then went tab by tab and Ctrl+C'd and Ctrl+V'd the taxonomy/term/# and created my URL Alias structure logically.
  

2. Then I went back and re-created the Views I was creating for my specific taxonomy terms.

• But this time, I entered the taxonomy/term/# in as the link instead of the URL Alias

3. Then I created custom menus.

• This time I used the "taxonomy/term/#" links here also.

4. VOILA!

I found some workaround PHP code that would've probably done the same things...but then theming and CSS would've grown so time-consuming that it would've just blown my mind!